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Shipping, customs and technical documents

Bills of lading, customs declarations, drawings and datasheets — documents built around numbering standards and tables rather than prose.

The documents in this cluster share a property that most business paperwork does not have: they were designed to be checked. A container number carries a check digit. A ship carries a seven-digit number whose last figure is a weighted sum of the first six. A manifest has a total that must equal the sum of its lines, a customs entry has a duty that should follow from a value and a rate, and a drawing has a revision letter in its title block that must match the top row of its revision table. None of those checks needs a human, a second source, or a confidence score to run.

That changes what these pages are about. The interesting question is almost never how to prompt a model to read a form; it is what the form guarantees, what it merely asserts, and which of its fields look like one number but are three. So each page here starts from the standard — ISO 6346, the Harmonized System, Incoterms, ISO 7200, ASME Y14.5, the GHS sixteen-section safety data sheet — and works outward to the failures that survive a clean-looking extraction.

Extracting Container and Weight Details From a Bill of Lading

The container number on a bill of lading can be verified arithmetically, and the word “weight” on the same document refers to at least three different numbers.

10 min read

Extracting Tariff Codes From a Customs Declaration Form

Only the first six digits of a tariff code mean the same thing everywhere; the digits after them, and any second code from a national chapter, are where the duty is actually decided.

10 min read

Extracting Declared Value and Duty Fields From a Customs Form

The declared value on a customs form depends on the delivery term printed beside it, and the duty figure gives you an arithmetic check on both.

10 min read

Extracting Container and Cargo Details From a Shipping Manifest

A manifest states its own totals, which makes a skipped or double-counted line detectable — provided you know which rows are data and which are carried-forward subtotals.

10 min read

Extracting Voyage and Vessel Information From a Shipping Manifest

The vessel name is mutable and unverifiable; the IMO number is neither, and its check digit takes six multiplications to verify.

9 min read

Extracting Title Block Data From an Engineering Drawing

The title block is standardised in position and largely standardised in content, but ISO and ASME drawings disagree on the field set — and on a symbol that has no text at all.

10 min read

Extracting Revision History From an Engineering Drawing

Revision letters are not the alphabet, so the obvious gap check raises false alarms — here is the sequence ASME Y14.35 actually defines and the cross-check that finds a genuinely missing revision.

10 min read

Extracting GD&T Callouts From a Mechanical Drawing

A feature control frame is meaningless as loose text: it needs the symbol resolved, the datums kept in order, and the feature it points at identified.

10 min read

Extracting Electrical Ratings From a Component Datasheet

A datasheet states three different kinds of voltage limit in three near-identical tables, and taking a number from the wrong one gives you a value the part cannot survive.

10 min read

Extracting Pinout Tables From a Component Datasheet

One datasheet describes several packages, so a pin number means nothing without the package it belongs to — and the pin count in the package name is often wrong.

10 min read

Extracting Hazard Statements From a Safety Data Sheet

H-codes are language-independent and precise, but four of them are published with a blank the supplier fills in — so the code alone loses information the printed text carries.

10 min read

Extracting First-Aid and Handling Sections From a Safety Data Sheet

The sixteen sections of a safety data sheet are fixed in number and order, which makes segmentation a solved problem — provided you anchor on the numbers and not the titles.

10 min read

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